


i may be sinning (but you're worth it)

by cosetties



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Established Relationship, Fluff and Angst, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-27
Updated: 2014-06-27
Packaged: 2018-02-06 10:47:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1855255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosetties/pseuds/cosetties
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Winter Soldier aims the gun at Captain America, but the world lies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i may be sinning (but you're worth it)

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this to see if I could still write angst, but it turned into horrible fluff.

The first rule of survival? The world lies.

The bed creaks when the Winter Soldier sits up, and there’s something tugging at the edge of his memory. It’s not an altogether uncommon experience these days. Lately, it always feels like his mind has been pulled apart and put back together all sorted out of place. He misses hours of his day, winds up in places without knowing how.  

The Avengers Tower had been all too easy to break into, even if he doesn’t remember the details. He’d had blueprints, had Stark’s booby traps mapped out, yes. An insider too, maybe? Had an Avenger turned their back on the good cause after all, allowed the Winter Soldier into their home to pick them off one by one? He shakes his head. No, that wasn’t it. He did this all on his own.

Got captured all on his own too, it seems. Fuck, it’d been a reckless mission anyway. Six against one, and on their turf too.

(HYDRA had given him impossible odds before, but he’d always come out alive. Maybe this was their way of terminating him quickly, cleanly.)

Keeping an ear out for sudden noise, he scans the width of the room. It’s not what you’d call a normal containment cell, with its standard white walls and emptiness. The bed isn’t even as hard as it should’ve been, and the Winter Soldier bounces against the mattress tentatively.  

Baseball posters from the 1940’s line the walls, for God’s sake, interspersed with Impressionist prints clearly picked in an attempt to make the décor somewhat tasteful. He recognizes Monet’s water lilies, Degas’s ballerinas. A beaten-up puke-green armchair is pushed against the nook between the wall and the large window, and in it, sleeps a very whole, very real Captain America, curled up under a wool blanket. His mouth is slack, and drool drips from the corner.

They’d patted the Winter Soldier down earlier, and the cotton shirt and pajama pants he’s wearing doesn’t leave room for concealed weapons. Instinctively, the Winter Soldier’s hand reaches out for the bedside table, feels up the haphazard mess until his fingers curl around the familiar grip of his Glock.

The weight is comforting as he stalks quietly across the room. The Winter Soldier can’t afford to get attached to weapons, but he’d picked it off a shady drug dealer after the incident in DC and hadn’t parted with it since.

It’s too goddamn easy, but that doesn’t register until he’s already disengaging the safety and pulling the trigger, gun aimed at Captain America’s head.

There’s a click, but it’s not the click of the gun, and suddenly, light blinds his vision, and Bucky reels back, blinking.

He trips over the stack of sketchbooks Steve had insisted wouldn’t become a safety hazard—liar—and his back hits the wooden floor hard. His metal arm fucking vibrates, and Bucky grits his teeth against the pain that rattles through his shoulder. His head rings, and his vision’s still blurry, but when he blinks fast enough, the flesh-colored blob hovering above him smoothens out into a very worried Steve.

“You okay?” Steve rasps as he runs his hands up and down Bucky’s body. Bucky winces as Steve’s fingers skim the bruise on the back of his head, and Steve catalogues it, keeps it stored in the mental journal he’s probably been keeping of Bucky’s recovery.  

Bucky doesn’t respond, suddenly aware of the gun he has grasped in his hand. He drops it as if burned.

“Shit, _shit_.” He screws his eyes shut. If he can’t see Steve, this whole night never happened, and he’d wake up tomorrow curled up safely in Steve’s arms again. “I hav’ta— _shit_.”

He sucks in deep breaths, but his brain still aches from the lack of oxygen. Steve’s hands on his shoulders are too warm, too real. He needs to leave before his chest constricts too hard, before Steve realizes that Bucky is a fool and a liar.

Before he can, Steve pulls him into his strong arms. Bucky lets out a wet sob. He even tries to punch Steve hard in the gut until he lets go, but Steve’s pain tolerance had always been superhuman, even when he’d been that scrawny 5’4’’ kid Bucky first fell in love with all those years ago. Steve tucks Bucky’s face into the junction between his shoulder and neck, and Bucky gets a real nice whiff of Steve’s vanilla-scented soap.

“You ain’t goin’ anywhere,” Steve breathes against Bucky’s shoulder. “Except back to bed.”

He’s trembling hard, and Bucky can see the cracks in his armor. Slowly, Bucky extricates himself enough so that he’s holding Steve an arm’s length away. Steve’s lip wobbles as he tries to smile. As if in a trance, Bucky brushes a stray tear away from the corner of Steve’s eye.

“Don’t you see? We’re all lying to ourselves. The Winter Soldier is still here. One day, I’m going to kill you,” he says, plain.

Bucky gestures around the room, at the row of his leather jackets hanging in Steve’s closet along with Steve’s cardigans, at the scattered sketchbooks filled with pictures of Bucky, or worse, pictures of Bucky with with the other Avengers as if he belongs there.

“None of this is real,” he says finally, and he wills Steve to believe it and let him go, because Bucky Barnes isn’t noble, not exactly. He’s too Brooklyn-bred for that, has seen too much shit happen to too many good people. He doesn’t have the courage to walk away from the only good thing he’s ever known.

“Stop your self-sacrificing bullshit, Barnes.” Steve’s voice is gruff. “And that’s an order.”

He throws the gun into Bucky’s lap, and shit, what’s he supposed to do with it? He can’t look down at the weapon sitting there so innocently, as if he hadn’t almost killed his best friend with it. He keeps his eyes stubbornly fixed on Steve’s face, because even the hope there is less painful than this. If he’s being honest with himself, he wants to brand this into his memory before Steve is lost to him forever.

“Look down at the gun, Buck,” Steve says exasperatedly. “You couldn’t have killed me if you’d tried.”

Because Captain America’s always right, in Bucky’s lap is Barton’s water gun, the one he’d bought on a whim at Wal-Mart hoping it’d be an effective defense against Natasha. It hadn’t worked.

“This doesn’t mean anything. Just because my real gun wasn’t there—“

Steve nods his head at the nightstand. On it lies Bucky’s real gun, gleaming in the light.

Tilting his forehead down until it touches Bucky’s in a comforting weight, Steve says, “You didn’t accidentally grab the wrong gun. You’re a trained assassin. You got the muscle memory to know a real gun from a plastic water gun.”

“You’re tellin’ me I grabbed the wrong gun on purpose,” Bucky says, almost angrily. He can do no wrong in Steve’s eyes, and it hurts, knowing he’d never live up to Steve’s expectations of him.

But maybe he’s angrier at himself, for wanting to believe Steve.

(The world lies, but Bucky Barnes lies with it.)

He exhales through gritted teeth and sags against Steve, clutching at the front of his shirt, his hands like claws. Steve's the only anchor Bucky has here, and he should let go, he knows. Steve likes to say that Bucky had always come to his rescue back in the day, when he’d gotten himself into scrapes too far out of his scope. Truth is, Steve had come to Bucky’s rescue by merely staying.

“Your programming may take time to wear off. We expected that. But you have control now.” Steve’s voice is soothing against Bucky’s ear. “And we got time.”

“Control,” Bucky scoffs. “Ain’t none of us in control really.”

Steve bats at the top of Bucky’s head, but he’s grinning hard now. “Stop gettin’ philosophical. You’re too pretty to be a thinker,” he says matter-of-factly.

Steve goes for his head again, but Bucky ducks, and the sound that comes out of his mouth is almost a chuckle. “The 21st century changed you. Where’s the sweet young gentleman I saved from  bullies on that school playground when we were kids?”

“ _You_ happened.”

The rest goes unspoken. _You happened, but I wouldn’t change it for the world._

Steve laces his fingers through Bucky’s and squeezes hard, until he’s almost cut off the circulation. Bucky can’t tell where Steve’s hand ends and his begins. Steve’s voice quakes as he says, “You’re wrong, you know. This—this is real.”

He looks so earnest  and so utterly _Steve_ that Bucky presses a furtive kiss to his lips. They’ve had other chances to explore each other, but it doesn’t move past chaste now. It’s not the time. Tonight is a night for healing, and Bucky already knows Steve has the ability to wreck him without even trying.

“Whaddaya say we share the bed? Like told times?” Bucky says.

“You kicked me outta bed ‘cause I was hoggin’ the blankets.”

Bucky takes Steve’s other hand. “Oh, the things I’ll put up with for you, Steve Rogers.”

**Author's Note:**

> here's my [tumblr](http://bisexualpeggy.tumblr.com) if you're interested!


End file.
